


flowers grow out of my grave (when i think about you)

by doctorhawke (AlwaysTired)



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Declarations Of Love, Melodrama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:15:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26882761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlwaysTired/pseuds/doctorhawke
Summary: "Despite the fear, unending, your name is the only word I can always say."Alistair gives Clare Cousland the rose. It happens in Haven's dragon caverns, which really sets the melodramatic creepy gothic mood that Clare so adores.Basically an excuse to write an overly ominous and flowery Clare love monologue! <3
Relationships: Alistair/Female Cousland (Dragon Age), Alistair/Female Warden (Dragon Age)
Kudos: 2





	flowers grow out of my grave (when i think about you)

**Author's Note:**

> This is extremely self indulgent <33
> 
> Several of Alistair's lines are pulled from the game and abridged a bit, mostly the stuff at the beginning, though I took a few liberties. 
> 
> For reference, when Clare mentions Eve, that's her older sister; they escape the origin and become Wardens together!

Clare stood, wobbly, as the fight ended. It was a bit of a shame that the dragonlings had to be dispatched, vicious as they were. She fumbled in her pack for a health potion, but before she found one, a soothing wash of healing magic washed over the party, and she threw a grateful look at Wynne. 

Squaring her shoulders, she started to look around the now-empty cavern. Dimly lit, and littered with small reptilian corpses, it nonetheless held a certain charm. She could feel that it served a purpose, and that though they were interlopers intent on cutting a path through its inhabitants, it promised an eerie sort of potential. She watched as her dark shadow cast along the cave walls, interplaying with those of the stalactites and stalagmites. Another shadow approached hers, and she looked up. 

Alistair was shifting from foot to foot, and held his pack to one side, with another hand still within it. 

“Did you find something?” Clare asked, curious at what the twisting passages they haunted might have yielded. 

“Ah, you could say that,” he stammered, holding something out. “Do you know what this is?”

Clare, squinting in the dark light, examined the object he held gingerly in his hands. “Is that a trick question?”

Alistair grinned, nervousness lessening. “Yes, absolutely, I’m trying to trick you. Is it working?”

“Depends on your end goal,” Clare said, looking up at him through her eyelashes. His nerves seemed to return all at once.

“Weeell, it’s just, I picked it back in Lothering. I remember thinking, ‘how could something so beautiful exist in a place with such despair and ugliness?’ I probably should have left it, but with the darkspawn coming, it would have been destroyed, and I just couldn’t.”

“That’s sweet, Alistair.”

“I thought, well, I thought that I might give it to you, actually? In a lot of ways, I think the same things when I look at you.” Alistair’s blush extended down his neck, and Clare cupped his hand softly with hers, the rose delicately held between their joined hands. 

He swallowed hard, seemingly resolute to say what he had intended to. “I was just thinking… here I am doing all this complaining, and you haven’t exactly been having a good time of it yourself. It’s all been death and fighting and tragedy. I thought I’d tell you what a rare and beautiful thing you are amidst all this darkness…. I don’t know, maybe it’s silly. It’s not like, being beautiful fixes anything, I just…”  
Clare stepped closer, her other hand reaching up to rest on his shoulder.

“Alistair. When I first tasted the darkspawn blood, I thought, ‘what a rare delicacy, to be trusted like this.’ And, unconscious, saw the archdemon for the first time, as we both have every night since. The noble form of the dragon, twisted by the taint into a world-ender. The fears of everyone in Thedas, personified, made rawly present in a fragile world. Cataclysmia, unending, gnashing teeth. Scorching flame. The Ferelden earth, a tinderbox. How to stand against this? How, to harness that evil which propels them forward, to take it into ourselves, and redirect its strength into forever corking the wine bottle so full of their victims’ blood? Their victims’ bodies, transformed, as we are transformed?”

Alistair looked at her somberly.

“But then I awoke, to Duncan, and to Eve, and to you, Alistair. So ready to stand by my side, and I realized, the camaraderie was what separated us from them. Each day, I awake to the sunrise alighting through the burlap of my tent, and I wonder how you slept. And I hear the noise of morning in the camp, and think, is he busy?”

“It’s unparalleled, the way that bright morning light feels against my skin, senses heightened, since the taint began to claim my soul. As though in it’s assertion over my remaining years it returns to me a sliver of hope, a consolation prize. The tunnel is long, Alistair, as the crown is heavy. As the land is dark. The shadow sweeps over us, extinguishing light after light. We have watched the death of the sun. We lit the torch, but betrayal after betrayal plagues our waking hours.”

At this, she paused, throat closing up. Alistair’s free arm circled her back. 

“And, and I, take solace in the embrace of hope. Despite the fear, unending, your name is the only word I can always say. In the depths of despair, there you are, by my side. Incredulous, irreverent, endless. In the fire, the blood, there we are together. We become the war, united against the darkspawn. One wave of movement, one mind. Corpses like flowers littering the springtime mud. Flowers in the grass.”

“Our deaths loom, not fearfully. Simply... unavoidable. Inevitable. Even more inevitable, is that we will be side by side in the deep dark, bodies returning, claimed. The darkspawn will know our flesh. Flesh of my flesh. We are them, against them, together. Do you see that I am not the same as I was, Alistair? I am not the girl I was, the storm has swept me into its vast unblinking eye. And here, I sense you can feel it in your joints when my weather shifts. Sore, aching, vigilant. But, together. Regardless of the measures I must take.”

At this last, her eyes fixed hard on his. The intensity in her gaze, the same which flattened ogres. The same which flew on griffon’s wings into the fray. Alistair’s heart skipped a beat. 

“And I will take those measures, Alistair. All the more for your sake. The mountains will crumble and the seas will drain with the force of it, I swear to you. And when we fall, our graves makeshift in the cascading avalanche of the depths, roses will bloom from our ashes.”

A beat. 

“Wait, a-are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

Clare’s smile spread slow, so wide each tooth showed. “What do you think I’m saying?”

“I-I think, well- are you saying you love me?”

“Until our end of days, yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> Songs because of COURSE I can't help myself:
> 
> Flowers Grow Out of My Grave- Dead Man's Bones  
> Geyser- Mitski  
> I Will Follow You Into the Dark- Death Cab for Cutie  
> Wasteland, Baby!- Hozier  
> Jedi- Melpo Mene


End file.
